In His Own Words: Bob Clampett on “Time for Beany”

Here are some more excerpts from my September 1978 interview with Bob Clampett at his studio on Seward Street. In this installment, he concentrates on his popular television puppet show, Time for Beany that led to an animated version. Bob reviewed the transcript and made some changes (additions, eliminations and clarifications) before it saw print. All of those changes were for the sake of accuracy not ego.

Jim Korkis: So, you left Warners but you didn’t jump right back into animation. I know you tried several different puppet shows, including one with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, that never sold until you developed “Time for Beany”.

Bob Clampett: When I first went out to sell my puppet show in the early days of television, people would say, “You are known for your cartoons so give us cartoons. Don’t give us puppets.” And no matter how I tried to enthuse them about puppets they kept stressing animation.

“Time For Beany” originated from Paramount’s KTLA-TV studio and we did fifteen minute shows, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for six years. During that time we won three Emmys for Best Children’s Program in 1949, 1950 and 1952.

We were also nominated in 1954 but didn’t win. We won a Peabody award. Stan Freberg was nominated, as Cecil, for a Best Actor Emmy in 1950 but didn’t win.

My mother remembered: “When my son won the first of his three Emmys for the Beany show, I was present at the awards dinner, and he presented his Emmy to me in thanks for helping him make his first Cecil puppet. . . and I still have this award in my front room, which I enjoy viewing.”

(Korkis Note: Clampett had interviewed his mother and kept those notes on file. I wonder where they are now and I wonder what other treasures are in them including her memories of Bob making the first Mickey Mouse stuffed dolls with Charlotte Clark. Bob’s dad was actually the head salesman for that company. Bob Clampett earned thirty cents per doll stuffing each one with kapok and brushing off the excess. Clark sold them to department stores like J.C. Penny and Bullock’s for $2.50 a doll and the stores sold them for five dollars each. But that is another story.)

JK: How was “Time for Beany” different than the other puppet shows of the time?

BC: I wanted to create a fantasy world, peopled with characters so believable that an audience could lose themselves in the illusion. Viewers watching “Howdy Doody” or “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”, both very popular shows, knew they were watching marionettes or puppets appearing as just that with humans. Whereas, fans who watched “Time for Beany” were amazed to see everything done in miniature. They accepted the illusion we attempted to convey that Beany and Captain Huffenpuff were full sized people and Cecil was ten feet tall. In addition, we offered the look, the sound, the movement, the adventure and comedy and ever-changing scenic locations that you might see in one of your favorite animated cartoons but we were dimensional to boot.

JK: I don’t think people today realize how popular the show really was.

BC: It was rumored that Albert Einstein liked it so much, he stopped work every day to watch. He was addressing a group of Nobel prize winners in 1950, and stopped abruptly, telling his audience he had to leave since it was “Time for Beany”. Groucho Marx of the Marx Brothers wrote to me and explained that it was the only show adult enough for his young daughter Melinda to watch. In fact, Groucho even made “Time For Beany” references on his own popular early television program, “You Bet Your Life”.

I was told that actor Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Paramount not to change the show’s air time so that he would not be forced to miss it. When actor Lionel Barrymore worked on the MGM set, studio head Louis B. Mayer forbade television sets on the lot because he felt they were a threat to the motion picture industry. So, Barrymore was forced to send his chauffeur to a local bar to watch “Time For Beany” and return to report on the plot developments in the puppet show when he wasn’t able to see it himself because of the shooting schedule.

The show was so popular that I created two additional daily shows, “Thunderbolt the Wondercolt” and “Buffalo Billy”, and a 30 minute-show that aired weekly, the “Willy the Wolf Show”.

JK: You were so successful with those shows that I have to ask why you didn’t just continue.

BC: I had been on the air with the Beany puppet show and it was a tremendous success but I felt the medium could be carried much further. I felt with the proper money we could do something with the puppet medium similar to what Disney had done with “Snow White”. About that time a fellow from Paramount had moved over to the ABC network and he had seen a preview of what Disney was going to be doing for the network and he told me in confidence: “What it all means, Bob, is frankly, no matter how well you do your puppets, animation is going to take over just like cowboys took over from detectives on tv.” I wasn’t willing to accept that fact right away but it became apparent that the buyers were only thinking “Cartoons!”

JK: How did the Beany and Cecil cartoon series develop?

BC: The first animated Beany and Cecil cartoon was “Beany and Cecil Meet Billy the Squid” in 1959. It was released theatrically. Most people don’t know that fact. The puppet show went on the air February 28, 1949 and exactly ten years later, the color cartoons started.

Andrew Crow is an amazing talent, and for him to be associated with Bob Clampett is equally impressive. His “As the Crow Flies” album is one of my all time favorite recordings in amy genre.

Ken Layton

September 26, 2013 9:15:44 am

Sadly, Andy Crow’s health is failing and he only has a couple of months to live.

ÖH

September 26, 2013 10:43:14 am

Tell him the cadence he uses to resolve “Here’s That Rainy Day” on that album is magnificent. One of my all time favorite recordings of any piece of music.

Robert Forman

September 25, 2013 9:08:56 am

Almost everything I know about Bob Clampett comes from the Funnyworld interview so many years ago (and still available on Mike Barrier’s site, of course). There was supposed to be a second part to that interview but unfortunately it was never published, apparently because of the negative reaction to part one (Clampett’s decision, I’m told). Part one ended with his leaving Warner’s, so its great to get this information regarding his post-Warner career. Keep it coming, please!

i’m a huge fan of bob clampett’s many works. time for beany was one of the all time great television series, and i’m right there in front of the line praising it and begging to have it released on dvd …

-BUT-

I must admit that my dander slightly rose when I read …

JK: How was “Time for Beany” different than the other puppet shows of the time?

BC: I wanted to create a fantasy world, peopled with characters so believable that an audience could lose themselves in the illusion. Viewers watching “Howdy Doody” or “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”, both very popular shows, knew they were watching marionettes or puppets appearing as just that with humans.

… kukla fran and Ollie was an amazing show. burr tillstrom truly gave his kuklapoitans the illusion of life, and the way fran Allison interacted with them helped complete that illusion.
I have trouble believing clampett’s story that he wanted to do puppets, but the networks wanted him to do animation. it would seem more likely the other way around. kukla fran and Ollie was a national phenom that helped get television sets into all the homes in America. I imagine the competing networks were all in a mad race to get their own puppet shows on the air.
further, I doubt it is coincidence that cecil resembles Ollie both in looks and in voice.

kukla fran and Ollie is a true treasure. I can’t recommend highly enough the kukla fran and Ollie early years dvd collection.

Burr Tillstrom’s Ollie is an out of the closet version of his Kukla. Tillstrom pioneered the first gay puppet character in live television but did not live to bask in that glory.

Mark McD

October 01, 2013 6:59:19 pm

Maybe what Bob meant was that the Kuklapolitans and Howdy (and Judy Splinters, and the Jerry Mahoney cast) were puppets on a puppet scale, interacting as puppets with regular humans. “Beany,” meantime, treated the puppets as human characters their own world, without a human host to be seen.

I have not seen enough of Howdy Doody nor KF&O to be sure, but didn’t those puppets maintain their belief that they were “real” people, dragons and whatnot (while Charlie McCarthy often joked about his xylemic existence)? Meantime, I recall one of the Cecil cartoons in which we learn what’s at the end of Cecil: a puppeteer’s arm. You can’t get much more meta than that.

Steve Sherman

September 25, 2013 4:30:31 pm

I was lucky enough to live in LA and catch just enough of the Clampett puppet shows to remember them. While “Time for Beany’ remains my favorite, “Thunderbolt the Wondercolt” was a fun show too. In case you’re wondering why Klaus Landsberg at KTLA wanted a puppet show, it was partly because Shirley Dinsdale and her puppet Judy Splinters had just left KTLA to go to KNBH (the NBC affilitate in LA). Shirley was a huge success at the time (winning one of the first Emmys). Landsberg wanted something similar which could be broadcast daily.
I would love to read the second part of the Funnyworld interview too. Maybe Michael Barrier will publish it someday.

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ABOUT JIM KORKIS

Jim Korkis is an internationally respected animation historian who in recent years has devoted his attention to the many worlds of Disney. He was a columnist for a variety of animation magazines. With his former writing partner, John Cawley, he authored several animation related books including The Encyclopedia of Cartoon Superstars, How to Create Animation, Cartoon Confidential and Get Animated’s Animation Art Buyer’s Guide. He taught animation classes at the Disney Institute in Florida as well as instructing classes on acting and animation history for Disney Feature Animation: Florida.